People are always looking for ways to reinvent the wheel. 

From recipes to fashion to SEO tools, it gets hard to keep track of every new addition, let alone determine what makes each of them unique.

In SEO today, a tool that helps you track your site’s organic keyword rankings is no longer enough.

(Not to mention, there’s more than enough rank tracking tools on the market to go around.)

So what does a rank tracker have to do to stand out?

Thankfully, instead of just monitoring your site’s search rankings for its target keywords, lots of rank tracking tools nowadays offer other features as well to provide users with more comprehensive SEO data.

As a result, you get more bang from your buck.

Not only do you get an overview of your SEO campaign, but you also have information to help you make sense of your current progress and how to improve it.

RankWatch is one of these tools coming out of the woodwork.

In this post, find out whether this rank tracking tool is worth a look based on its features and use cases.

What Is RankWatch?

RankWatch is an SEO tool that helps you gather data on your SEO strategy and campaign.

One of the biggest pain points in SEO is collecting information related to your SEO performance. While you can manually mine and harvest information online using different free tools, RankWatch sets out to make your life easier by doing the research for you.

With RankWatch, all you need to do is to make sense of the data presented to you and focus on improving your site’s SEO performance. More importantly, you can do so without making a dent in your budget!

RankWatch Review: A Rank Tracking Tool to Watch Out For?

 

 

Main Features

Rank Tracking

At the heart of RankWatch is its Rank Tracking tool.

How high (or low) you rank for your target keyword on organic search results indicates whether or not your SEO campaign is working. The software is fully aware of this fact by letting you track your keyword rankings from over 177 search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and more.

From here, you can view the Page Score of each ranking page and see how optimized they are for their target keywords. The tool will also show you SEO factors that you need to work on based on their importance. Attending to these factors could help your page rank higher for its keyword.

Below are the major factors that the Page Score considers:

• Page content – Text/image ratio must be at least 15%

• Keyword density – Too many keyword mentions on your page can put it at risk of lower rankings

• WWW resolve – WWW and non-WWW versions must redirect to the same page

• Title tag – Your page title must contain your target keyword

• Outbound links – Your page mustn’t point out to lots of links away from your site

• Heading tags – They must be distributed evenly to showcase content importance

Website Analysis

If you want to get an overview of how a website is faring in terms of SEO, you can use RankWatch’s Website Analysis feature.

It computes the site’s SEO score in a matter of minutes based on the most important ranking factors. The higher the score, the more optimized the site is!

You can use this feature if you want to benchmark your site, spy on competitors or research for leads.

The Website Analysis checks the page using these parameters:

• SEO – Is the page observing the best and latest optimization practices?

• Mobile – Does the site have a responsive design on mobile?

• Social – How many fans and followers does the site have?

• Speed – How fast does the site load based on different factors?

• Visitors – What’s the site’s estimated traffic?

• Technology – What technology is the site using?

Hidden Keywords

Despite your keyword research, it’s possible for certain keywords to slip from your hands. Therefore, your site pages may be ranking for keywords that you aren’t aware of.

The Hidden Keyword feature gives you the lowdown on keywords that your pages are ranking for in the top 100 results. The data provided here helps round out your keyword research and optimize your site pages with the keywords that bring the most traffic.

From here, you can choose to add the keywords to your Rank Tracking report if you want to monitor their position in SERPs.

Competitors

To efficiently scale your SEO performance, you need to determine how well your site fares compared to other similar sites.

RankWatch helps you in your competitor research by finding your most relevant paid and organic competitors.

The number of competitors will depend on the number of keywords you’re tracking. The more keywords you’re monitoring, the greater the competitor list will be, which is a good thing!

They’ll help you understand where you stand online and what you need to do to jump over them in the SERPs.

Backlink Analyzer

The volume and quality of your backlinks arguably play the biggest role in your SEO campaign.

RankWatch breaks down your link profile into a variety of factors that you need to consider when analyzing your backlinks, including TLD distribution, nofollow vs. dofollow, image vs. text (how many links are attached to images as opposed to anchor texts), and others.

Using the information here, you can determine how you need to approach your upcoming link building campaign to diversify your backlink profile.

If you want to analyze your competitor’s backlinks, enter their URLs in the Link Explorer. This tool will give you similar data as seen for your own backlinks on the Backlink Analyzer page, including anchor text, URL Flow Metrics, domain Flow Metrics, link type and visibility.

 

CEO/Agency Dashboard

If you have SEO clients, then it’s important to send them reports that are easy to understand and perfectly showcase your abilities.

RankWatch’s Agency Dashboard gives your clients a bird’s-eye view of metrics that rake in profits for their business. The branded reports also help you forecast your SEO performance and the effects it will bring to their website.

The report initially includes the SERPs for your target keywords to give clients an overview of their respective movements.

To provide them with better data, you can also integrate Google Analytics into the report. It creates a visual overview of your traffic and other metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, traffic sources and more.

Pros of RankWatch

Excellent price for beginners

RankWatch is a very affordable SEO tool for the things it can do.

For $29/month, you can track 250 keywords and get fresh data every day.

You can also monitor 145,000 backlinks on top of the automated alerts, white label reporting and competitor analysis, among other features. For small businesses or startups, the price is hard to top considering the features that come with it.

For higher plans starting at $99/month, users can track more keywords and backlinks and enable a white label interface for your clients. Give them access to the interface and they can log in to see their site’s SEO progress.

This feature beats sending them regular reports since they can check out the results themselves.

Website Analyzer is a great lead generation tool

As simple a tool as the Website Analyzer is, it works best as part of your lead generation campaign.

You can run SEO reports on potential customers and see which areas of their website need attention. You can then use the report to pitch them on how your SEO services can help them earn more money online.

The report provides an aggregated score to help your leads understand how optimized their website is. The lower the score, the more opportunities for you to help them out and bag them as clients.

Easy-to-understand SEO reports are perfect for white labeling

The last thing your clients need is an SEO report that doesn’t make sense.

Ultimately, they don’t care about how much traffic they’re getting or how long those visitors stay on their site. What they want to hear is how your SEO campaign is making an impact on their bottom line.

RankWatch’s white label features use data from the tool and Google Analytics to help make sense of your SEO campaign. It makes reporting easier by generating one-click reports from pre-made templates.

 

You can design the template to include an introduction and a conclusion. Take this time to summarize the client site’s progress and provide actionable items at the end of the report. You can populate the report using the visual data drawn from your Google Analytics account.

You can also schedule the reports to be automatically sent to your clients so you don’t have to worry about remembering to manually send them.

Cons

Research doesn’t provide enough data

At best, the Research features of RankWatch are clunky and don’t give enough juice to your SEO report.

The Link Explorer is a fine tool to find backlinks from any domain or URL. However, there’s no way to export the data or use it for your report. You’ll end up manually visiting each backlink, which defeats the purpose of using an SEO tool in the first place.

The Keyword Suggestion doesn’t really provide any valuable data at all. Other than the CPC and keyword volume, there’s not much to sink your teeth into. You’re better off researching for keywords using Google’s Keyword Planner or Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, both free tools that give you a lot more data.

Too basic and simple

If you’re familiar with most SEO tools out there, you’ll notice that RankWatch doesn’t break any new ground with its features. All features available in RankWatch are found in most SEO software solutions. Worse yet, the competition offers even more functionalities.

With other tools like Serpstat and Ahrefs, to name a few, you can export data and delver deeper into the provided information directly. RankWatch simply gives you the data in isolation.

For example, you can’t take the backlinks you found from the Link Explorer and use the pages there to find their missing keywords or analyze their aggregate SEO score.

Even without comparing RankWatch to other tools, it simply needs better research features to help users improve their SEO workflow.

Verdict

RankWatch tries to break the mold by becoming more than just a rank tracking tool. Ironically and unfortunately, the addition of these features makes RankWatch just another tool in the bunch.

The Rank Tracking feature remains its strongest suit. But in my opinion, RankWatch should’ve further refined its rank tracking capabilities instead of branching out to offer other SEO services. The Research section needs more work to be able to effectively help you gather information and put it to good use.

The best thing going for RankWatch is its low price point which is ideal for small businesses that don’t demand a lot from an SEO tool.

All things considered, RankWatch is perfect for monitoring search rankings and generating SEO reports.

As an all-around SEO tool, however, there are simply better alternatives on the market that provide better data and features.

 

Hold Up, We Have Something for You!

CoSpot readers can now receive a free trial of the Monitor Backlinks SEO tool.

If you think RankWatch is up your alley, you’re going to love Monitor Backlinks.

It offers an excellent keyword rank tracker and backlink management tool, similar to RankWatch.

The main difference is perhaps that Monitor Backlinks is more streamlined—it’s focused on keyword rankings, SEO metrics, backlinks and nothing else.

If that’s what you’re focused on, like most SEO professionals, you don’t want to pay for a bunch of bells and whistles you’ll never use.

It’s also designed to grow with you accommodate the needs of growing, large-scale and even enterprise-level operations.

Take advantage of the trial period to compare both Monitor Backlinks and RankWatch, then choose what’s best for you.

Claim your free trial of Monitor Backlinks today!